Time's up

Happy New Year all!

So, the deadline for the Terry Pratchett Prize was yesterday - and I just managed to meet it.

It was back on Friday 8 October that I decided to try and finish my science fiction novel in time to enter the competition, at which point 15,000 words were written.

I finally reached the end of the book on Tuesday 28 December (and then spent three more days on a quick edit). I wrote 70,000 words in 81 days - that's 864 words per day on average. My wife stuck a graph on the wall to help me keep track.

Now I know what it takes to get the words out; the next step is to get it published. Being shortlisted (or even winning!) the competition would be a dream come true; failing that, I'll make a go of it on my own. And, meanwhile, I'll get to work on the sequels. :)

It's been an ambition of mine to complete a publishable novel for nearly a decade. Mission complete. (And yet, only just begun...)

UK Premiere

My short film, The Man Who Married Himself, has its UK premiere as part of the BFI London Film Festival on Thursday this week!

I handed in my MA Creative Writing dissertation a couple of weeks ago, and I was intending to focus back on screenwriting - with a mission to write the next low-budget indy breakthrough hit.

But then I saw the Terry Pratchett Prize, for a debut novelist writing a time travel story set on Earth. I happen to be a quarter of the way through writing a comic science fiction novel about a time travelling janitor. Destiny?

So I've set myself a challenge to finish it by the deadline - that's 1000 words a day until 31 December. I've only been doing it a week and I'm already behind... to work!